Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
For the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.
In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, recommending shows about Scots, AI, conspiracy theories, and more, plus my critics panel at Pleasance Courtyard…
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One last thing up here. Against my better judgement, I have started an Instagram account for The Crush Bar. You can find and follow it here, should you wish to…
The festival is seven days away…
FullHouse, a new “Letterboxd for theatre”, is launching at Summerhall during the festival. You can find out more from me here in this exclusive with The Stage.
Also from me in The Stage: more on the ongoing travel disruption caused by the Princes Street fire; more on the debate around the new tourist tax; and a bit about Sold Out Board, a new platform operating ticket lotteries during the festival.
Fallout from the TV festival moving to Manchester in 2027 continues. The National reports that the organisation received almost £600,000 of Scottish government funding before deciding to leave Scotland, while Deadline reports that conversations are underway about simply replacing it with another one.
Another list of recommendations, this one from Natasha Tripney’s Café Europa…
It’s not really festival-related, but I have written the cover interview for The Stage’s August edition, which is focused on Scotland and the Fringe: it’s with Alan Cumming and features a few insights into his regime at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, plus some wonderful photos of him posing in Perthshire with his dog.
Have you booked your ticket to The Crush Bar Live yet?
A quick reminder that, at 11am on Thursday 13th August, in Pleasance Courtyard’s Cabaret Bat, I will be chatting to fellow critics Holly Williams (Exeunt, The Times), Tim Bano (The FT, The Standard) and Mickey-Jo Boucher (100k+ subscribers on YouTube) about shows at the festival. You really should come along. It’s free.
Shotgunned - Assembly George Square Studios, 3.10pm
I first saw Matt Anderson’s Shotgunned at the Fringe two years ago, in a cramped room with an awkward stage and sound bleed from the bar downstairs, and I was absolutely blown away by it. I have been shouting about it everywhere I can ever since, and I am delighted that it is returning to the festival in expanded form this year, as part of the Made In Scotland Showcase. Did I have something to do with that? Maybe.
Written and directed by Anderson, and featuring two beautifully naturalistic performances from Fraser Allan Hogg and Lorna Panton, the two-hander hops around in time to track the evolution of a relationship between Dylan and Roz, orbiting around a central trauma that tilts their lives entirely. For a debut play, it is astonishing: deftly constructed and achingly moving, and evocative of short, stylish plays like Lungs, Constellations and Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons.
You can read my original five-star review in The Stage here and my interview with Anderson below. You can watch the music video his company Kangaroo Court recently made for Staring in Spaces Dance With U (a track that is used beautifully in the show) here, too. And you can get tickets via the button below.
Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed) - Summerhall, 4.30pm
You have almost certainly heard about the Sauna Theatre by now. The brainchild of director James Grieve and designer Lucy Osborne, it is an 80-seat sauna (the UK’s largest, apparently) that is being set up at Summerhall to host a mix of literary discussions, dance parties (yep) and Aufguss sessions (an immersive experience involving essential oils and towel wafting that is popular in Germany).
Appropriately, it is also hosting a tenth-anniversary remount of Bubble Schmeisis, Nick Cassenbaum’s celebrated one-man show about growing up amid the Jewish steam-baths of East London, which first ran at the Fringe in 2016.
How will the Sauna Theatre work? I have no idea. I have been invited to go and find out on Thursday and will report back somehow. In the meantime, you can read my interview with Cassenbaum here (conducted around his frenetically funny 2024 political satire Revenge: After The Levoyah) and get tickets via the button below.
Mayflies - Brown’s Of Leith, 4pm
Grid Iron is an award-winning Edinburgh-based company, led by Judith Doherty and Ben Harrison, which has spent over three decades staging imaginative site-specific work everywhere from shipyards to swimming pools to Edinburgh Airport.
This August, they are taking over a warehouse in Leith with an adaptation of Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel (made into a series in 2022) about a group of Ayrshire teenagers that go on a riotous weekend in Manchester in the mid-1980s, then reflect on their friendship as they face up to mortality in the modern day.
Adapted and directed by Harrison, it features a cast stuffed with Scottish talent including Lucianne McEvoy and Graham Mackay-Bruce, and should be well worth the trip down from the city centre (despite the absence of trams), not least because of the cool new food court next door. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Great Shakespeare Showdown - theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall, 3.10pm
Shakespeare was surprisingly popular in the Wild West. Troupes of actors would tour between towns and cities. Regular folk would memorise and perform passages for entertainment. Mines were named after Shakespearean characters: Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Miranda. There is even a ghost town named after the great man himself: Shakespeare, New Mexico.
American playwright, actor, educator and Edinburgh Fringe regular Dennis Elkins’ new comic work The Great Shakespeare Showdown is inspired by this Badlands bardolatry, and by a particular incident involving actors Edwin Forrest and William Macready in Manhattan in 1849. Set in Colorado in the early 1880s, it focuses on two esteemed actors – one American, one British – duelling with each other, not with pistols, but with Shakespearean soliloquies and insults.
Written by Elkins, directed by Penny Cole and produced by Flying Solo!, a company with a strong track record of bringing impressive work across the Atlantic to the Fringe, The Great Shakespeare Showdown runs at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall for the first two-and-a-half weeks of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Extra Dry - Greenside @ Riddles Court, 3.05pm
This autobiographical one-woman play focusses on MJ, whose heavy-drinking, hedonistic lifestyle furnishes her with plenty of crazy stories that prove popular with her pals. What happens, though, when your social standing is built on a self-destructive habit? Is it better to lean into your status as an entertaining alcoholic? Or face up to a more mundane reality?
Written and performed by Tennessee-raised, New York City-based actor and playwright Michelle Renee Johnson, and co-created and directed by Lila Rachel Becker, Extra Dry began as a ten-minute personal monologue in 2023 then gradually grew into a fully-fledged show, which premiered to acclaim at New York City Fringe Festival in April this year.
Now, after preview performances at 59E59 Theatre’s East To Edinburgh showcase in New York City, the show arrives in the Scottish capital under the aegis of producer Allison Parker, who has a strong track record in bringing invigorating, entertaining work across the Atlantic. With a set by Patti Panyakaew, sound by Ryan Gamblin, lighting by Rebecca Mahar and costumes by Maeve Rose, it runs at Greenside @ Riddles Court all month. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Thanks for reading
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The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; Ellie Keel Productions; The Women’s Prize For Playwriting
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That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus
Should upgrade my $7 membership to $70 for suggesting Shotgunned. Those short, asynchronous vignettes - so moving, balletic, unforgettable. Venue was intimate but lack of ventilation was a bit torturous by the end.